We've been in this space for a lil bit too with eesel (https://eesel.app) and it's really cool to see more people tackling these problems. It's about time we fix this.
This post resonates a lot! I think finding a clear focus and going deep on it takes you places no one (even you) can anticipate in advance. It's how you can create something amazing.
I felt that personally working on eesel [1]. We kept a tight focus on the problem (making it easier to refer back to your work more easily) and it's become far more than we could've expected. Ironically, the classic "is this a company or a feature" question might actually be a validation of keeping scope.
The only caveat I'd add to the post is that you should try to solve only one problem, but you should spend time exploring before hand to discover the broader set of problems and prioritise carefully.
It's so tough taking stances to defend things of 'intangible' (or at least hard to quantify) value like Apple has. I worry it's almost 'inevitable' for companies to cave in.
After a while, we learned that what our users really wanted was to have everything in one place.
This is so spot on! We're having similar learnings with eesel [1] too. Work is far too scattered across apps. Thanks for sharing your journey so far and congrats on the launch!
Thanks for trying eesel out and sharing your thoughts! Helps us heaps. Some pointers on that:
1. To edit the rules for a Folder, open the Folder and head to "Add pages" > "Automatically". We've heard it a few times that discoverability of this isn't great, and it's definitely something we should improve.
3. To clarify, everything is local by default and only pages you explicitly share by adding to a Workspace, a shared Folder and so on are shared.
4. I imagine we'll want to support eesel profiles at some point to better separate personal and work things, but one workaround till then is to have different Chrome profiles and install eesel on both.
Let us know if you have any other thoughts that pop up!
Love that idea, it's something we've been floating around ourselves. We're not sure if the problems around that are painful enough for people to change existing habits (is it annoying enough for you to switch apps?), but let us know if you have any thoughts on that!
When a document is shared with you in eesel (say, your teammate adds it to a team folder), even if you haven't seen the document before, it'll appear in your eesel. It's a way to discover what teammates are up to.
The idea is that everyone can automatically push their work into shared folders, and build a team 'source of truth', without the overhead of maintaining things.
Everything runs fully locally by default, but to enable features like sharing pages with teammates, we need to have servers. The content of your pages is still only stored locally on your browser, no exceptions. We run through the details in our privacy policy - https://www.eesel.app/privacy
Fun fact - we did consider being totally serverless and having some distributed, peer-to-peer database, but there were too many unknowns to go down that path. Maybe one day!
Thanks, glad you liked the demo! We'll hopefully support Safari soon.
The feed works by pushing new pages you or your teammates make and share. For instance, if you make a new Notion page and add it to a Folder, it'll get pushed to other teammates who are members of the Folder. There's no automatic way to notify teammates of an update for now, but we're working on something related to do that right now.
I just checked and the footer links work fine for me, and I'm not sure which links you're referring to. Privacy is really important to us, we've gone through security reviews in a bunch of notable companies, and we all take a lot of personal pride in our attention to detail here. Note how you can use eesel without even logging in.
I agree that a few points seem 'matter of fact' at face value. What's weird is that IMO even people that would see this to be obvious, sometimes behave counter to it. For example, I've seen good teams release things that pretty much anyone could classify as 'broken' from the outset, but they do it anyway because there's an overarching 'hustle obsession' and aphorisms like "ship to learn" make it easy to justify that. It's probably a mix of flawed incentives, company culture (glorification of failure?), and so on, but my point there is that in the weeds, it can be hard to put even the simplest rules in practice, with nuance.
I totally agree re books, blogs, tweets. Categorical statements are easier to remember and digest, nuance is kind of boring to talk about (read: politics atm, or always?). Maybe it's something about human psychology that we are collectively drawn to the simpler, discrete answers because they feel more comforting and approachable.
We've been in this space for a lil bit too with eesel (https://eesel.app) and it's really cool to see more people tackling these problems. It's about time we fix this.
Keen to be inspired and learn! :)